His film debut came quickly: a small part in Dogfight (1991), a River Phoenix film set in the early days of the Vietnam War era. The role was minor, but the business of getting into a film at all, within a year of arriving in Hollywood, was not. He was noticed.
## School Ties, Encino Man, and the Question of What Kind of Star
The two films that established Brendan Fraser as a recognizable presence in American cinema came out in the same year, 1992, and they pulled in different directions.
Encino Man was a broad comedy about a caveman thawed from ice and introduced to suburban California life. Fraser played Link, the caveman, and brought to the role an almost puppyish physical expressiveness — he wasn’t just playing “confused by modern life,” he was performing confusion at a cellular level, finding the comedy in every gesture and reaction. The film was a significant commercial success for its budget, and it showed that Fraser could carry a comedy.
School Ties, released the same year, was a more serious proposition. Fraser played David Greene, a Jewish student on a football scholarship at an elite New England prep school in the 1950s, who conceals his religion to fit in and must eventually confront both his deception and the institution’s anti-Semitism. The cast included Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Chris O’Donnell, most of them at similarly early stages of careers that would become considerably larger. School Ties showed that Fraser could carry dramatic weight, that the physical equipment could be made to serve something real.